[MUD-Dev] Games vs. simulations

[Brandon J. Rickman]

On Wed, 14 Jun 2000 adam at treyarch.com wrote:
> As you'll frequently discover in this business, being a 'holy grail' usually
> means "unattainable with current technology."  That doesn't necessarily
> stop people from trying, however.  A perfect example is realtime 3D: games
> went from looking extremely nice (high res, 2D art) to extremely terrible
> (super low-poly 3D with little filtering) when 3D became the 'holy grail'
> of gaming.  Eight years later, realtime 3D games are *barely* starting to look
> reasonably good, although for pure freeze-frame beuty they cannot approach
> what a good 2D artist can create with DPaint or even the Gimp (or Photoshop).

I've noticed a strange trend in the promotional materials for computer
games, like cover art and magazine ads.  Used to be you had curvaceous
cartoony bimbos in the ads, they had nothing to do with the game but were
there simply to attract the male audience.

We have the same ads now, but instead of the pen-and-ink style, the
figures are constructed out of textured polygons.  And it is made quite
obvious: you see sharp edges around the cleavage, angular faces, shading
errors.  Think Lara Croft vs. Jessica Rabbit.

- Is this an intentional denial of the Photoshop aesthetic, a refusal to
make the image neat and clean?  Does bad art sell more games?

- Is this supposed to be a reminder of the digital nature of these
characters, that they are completely artificial fantasy women?  Not
just artificial, but created with computer technology.

- Is it supposed to demonstrate the sophistication of the 3d rendering
engine?  This is seemingly contradictory, because the bad rendering
reveals the poor "photorealism" of the actual product.

- Perhaps the programmers have taken over the marketing, and simply don't
know what they are doing.

Just curious.

- B!




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